Thursday, February 2nd, 4pm-5:30pm with reception to follow, 5733 S University Ave, 1st Floor
Panelist Bios
Blaire Morseau (Pokagon Potawatomi) is currently Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Interim Director of Native American and Indigenous Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston. Her research interests are Indigenous science fictions and futurity, counter-mapping, traditional knowledge, and digital heritage. Her most recent book project is titled As Sacred to Us: Simon Pokagon’s Birch Bark Stories in Their Contexts expected to be available in October 2023 from Michigan State University Press. The book contains updated transcriptions and translations of Pokagon’s birch bark stories — which span thousands of years of Indigenous knowledge — and are contextualized by new interpretations and recent discoveries from community members, Potawatomi language speakers, and scholars.
Hiʻilei Julia Kawehipuaakahaopulani Hobart (Kanaka Maoli) is Assistant Professor of Native and Indigenous Studies at Yale University. An interdisciplinary scholar, she researches and teaches on issues of settler colonialism, environment,and Indigenous sovereignty. Her first book, Cooling the Tropics: Ice, Indigeneity, and Hawaiian Refreshment (Duke University Press, 2022) is a recipient of the press’s Scholars of Color First Book Award. Her articles have appeared in refereed journals such as NAIS, Media+Environment, Food, Culture, and Society, and The Journal of Transnational American Studies, among others. She is the co-editor of the special issue “Radical Care,” for Social Text (2020), and the editor of Foodways of Hawaiʻi (Routledge, 2018). She is currently working on a project about cultural memory, commemoration, and hauntings in Hawaii State Parks. Professor Hobart holds a PhD in Food Studies from New York University, an MA in Studies in the Decorative Arts, Design, and Culture from the Bard Graduate Center, and an MLS in Rare Books Librarianship and Archives Management from the Pratt Institute. She joins Yale from the University of Texas at Austin, where she was an Assistant Professor of Anthropology.
Tarren Andrews is a postdoctoral associate and visiting presidential fellow at Yale University. She will join the faculty there as Assistant Professor in Ethnicity, Race, and Migration in July 2023. Her scholarship employs critical Indigenous studies to re-evaluate and re-narrativize stories of the early medieval North Atlantic (pre-1100). Her forthcoming book takes a transtemporal approach to law and literature, re-examining legal and literary artifacts from the early medieval North Atlantic—like the Domesday Book (England, ca. 1085), the Treaty of Alfred and Guthrum (England, ca. 878), and the Old English poem The Wife’s Lament (ca. 10th century)—alongside resonant documents and stories from Turtle Island (North America) including the Dawes Act of 1887, the Hellgate Treaty of 1859, and the Canadian Indian Act of 1876. This work seeks to find origins of Anglophone settler colonial logics as they are manifested in U.S. and Canadian settler law to better understand how we might imagine anticolonial futures. She has recently published an essay in Exemplaria comparing medieval settler and Indigenous approaches to slipstream sci-fi writing. Titled “Harold and Custer on the Slipstream,” this essay argues for the inherent hope offered by Indigenous storytelling. In addition to these projects, Dr. Andrews is also passionate about language revitalization and translation. She contributed the opening lines (ln. 1-12) in the 2021 translation of Beowulf by All. The citation for this “reservation translation” includes the Flathead Indian Reservation where Tarren grew up, which she credited as a co-author to honor the relationship between land and language.